Poster Abstract

P.2 Jose Vicente Perea-Calderon (RHEA for ESA/ESAC)

The XMM-Newton Pipeline. 20 years of mission processed in 5.5 days

After 20 years of mission the XMM-Newton space observatory has already successfully completed more than 14.000 pointing observations. Those observations are performed by 3 X-ray telescopes and 1 Optical/UV telescope, all of them yielding simultaneous astronomical data over 6 different instruments: 3 X-ray cameras (European Photon Imaging Cameras, EPIC), 2 X-ray spectrometers (Reflection Grating Spectrometer: RGS1/2), and the Optical/UV instrument (Optical Monitor: OM). As a consequence more than 60.000 science X-ray exposures have been carried out satisfactorily, together with around 100.000 exposures from the different OM observing modes.

This huge number of science exposures has been processed by the XMM-Newton Pipeline Processing System. The number of high-quality calibrated science data products generated by the Pipeline has risen to more than 12.000.000 data files, including X-ray calibrated event lists, X-ray sky images and X-ray high resolution spectra of the main target from RGS1/2.

A set of ingenious algorithms of source detection and background estimate are used on the X-ray images to get the list of detected sources in the field of view. From these source lists several source catalogs have been compiled during the mission. For each detection, a wealth of information is provided, including more than 500.000 spectra and time series of the brightest individual detections.

Thanks to an important effort on the analysis of the individual Pipeline processing algorithms and a deep optimization of the computing resources, we have been able to complete this enormous processing workload in only 5.5 days.